Angkor saw a stegosaur?

Stone carvings adorning the temples of Angkor, reclaimed from the jungles of modern-day
Cambodia, depict aspects of everyday life along with Hindu and Buddhist mythology.
They are 800 years old.

One of the glyphs1 appears to show what even most children today would
readily identify as Stegosaurus, a dinosaur that evolutionary paleontologists
say became extinct millions of years ago—supposedly long before man walked
on this planet.

Photo by Chris Maier. <www.UnexplainedEarth.com>

So how to explain the stegosaur glyph? There were no paleontology textbooks 800
years ago to show the ancient carvers what a reconstructed stegosaur fossil would
have looked like.2 Clearly, the evolutionary history is wrong. Instead,
dinosaurs once lived alongside man, just as the Bible says (Genesis 1:24–28, 6:19–20, 8:15–19; Job 40:15–19),3 which explains how
the ancient people of Angkor could know what a stegosaur looked like.

References and notes

Even in the unlikely event that the ancient jungle-dwellers could have extricated
a fossil from rock without modern techniques, it would not be obvious from the fossil
alone what the original animal looked like. That has required the accumulation of
specialist knowledge in modern times.

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Readers’ comments

T. I.,Australia, 20 April 2012

It doesn't disprove evolution. If evidence surfaced that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, it merely brings into question the timing of extinction, rather than the evolutionary process. Intriguing though the similarities are to a stegasaurus, the resemblance is superficial. The head is too large and there are no spikes on the tail. One could argue that the image is based on word of mouth retellings or simply bad observation, but that is also supposition. By itself, it is not proof.

David Catchpoole responds

We never said it was proof. And you say that "if evidence surfaced that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, it merely brings into question the timing of extinction ...". Yes, it sure does, by about 65 million years! It would overturn every secular book written about dinosaurs that claims dinos became extinct before man appeared. (In other words, in my experience, every secular dino book!)

As for your other straw-clutchings, an article in the next Creation magazine addresses those (and other) skeptical 'objections':

O'Brien, J. and Doyle, S., Did Angkor really see a dinosaur?, Creation35(2):41-43, 2013.

David F.,Australia, 1 January 2013

I just read a comment on another website claiming this stone had been recently "faked". The reason they gave was that the stone was a different colour to the surrounding stones and therefore "newer". The face of this particular stone had clearly been cleaned for photographic clarity and the old dirt deposits are still seen in the more inaccessible recesses of the carving. The other visible face of the stone is just as weathered as all the other stones. So if someone had the wherewithal to execute such a fake, why match the clear weathering on one face of the stone and not the face bearing the carving? Ridiculous. What they also failed to mention was the near impossibility of removing the surrounding stone and then replacing it all leaving no evidence of such interference. I suppose it just shows the lengths to which the anti-creationists will go to discredit the clear evidence before them simply because it does not fit their long-age paradigm (2 Peter 3:3-7)